Category Archives: TRAVEL

For those who are still waiting for the rest of my story of Bali, day 06 is a shopping day. The best shopping place if you came to Bali is in Krisna, especially Krisna Sunset Road Kuta, the biggest and complete shopping place for Balinese souvenirs. Some friends said that Sukowati market offers cheaper place and various items. However, based on my opinion, the cheapest place to shop is in Tanah Lot. But you have to bargain in order to get good price. But if you are a bit lazy to do that, Krisna is the place you should go. Trust me.

Krisna at Sunset Road

Apart from shopping, we went also to Denpasar to visit an old place where I live before. We passed by Bajra Sandhi monument and stopped by.

Bajra Sandhi

The next day my family and I were getting ready to go back to our city. We visited the Discovery shopping mall which offered a beautiful scenery of Kuta shoreline.

Discover the view of Kuta Beach

Our holiday was fantastic, full of fun and enjoying nature things. I am grateful for being able to read another page in another chapter of this world.

Ubud is famous for its paddy terrace, monkey forest, and also art and crafts. We visited Pure Ubud and the famous place from Eat, Pray, Love movie, the Central Market Ubud. There are many local stuffs we can buy for souvenirs.

Ubud Central Market

Pura Tirta Empul is located in Tampak Siring. It is famous with water temples as a place for cleaning Balinese people from sins and evils. Many international tourists also follows this traditional thing.

Tampak Siring Palace

On the other hand, the Lake of Mount Batur is in a higher place. It is a cold place, with heavy wind, but the scenery is beautiful. You can see Mount BBaturin a great distance. Here also there is Trunyan village if you cross the lake. Too bad that the people in Trunyan is not as friendly as other people within Bali area. But you can see many are still practising the traditional ceremony.

Day 04 is a walking day tour. We decided to just walking around the Legian shopping street, after peeping at Legian Beach. Legian Beach is next to Kuta Beach, within the same shorelines goes to North. During morning till noon hours there were few people only, since it will be hot sunny beach.

Legian Beach

Legian Street is a shopping street area for fashion boutique, hotels, barclub, and massage places. It is where the Bali bomb memorial monument also located. Seeing the name of victims’list, you can imagine how the bomb devastated lives of many people.

Bali bomb memorial

Kuta Square is a famous place for shopping also, and the stores have many unique design. I found 1 store which has many windows for its facade.

Windows facade

The good thing for walking tour is that you are able to locate your position on the map exactly and find shortcuts. This helped us to find a nice place for our dinner, Waroeng tanpoh. It has a nice ambience, full of old stuff, and not expensive. Not many people knew this place since its location is in a narrow street.

Day 02 in Bali is almost full of beach exploring also culinary. First place to be visited was GWK (Garuda Wisnu Kencana). The ticket entrance to this place was quite expensive, IDR 70,000 per adult. However, this is quite word with how vast is the area, plus we got free entrance to Barong attraction and Garuda Cinema, the story behind Garuda and Wisnu.

From GWK, we continue to Melasti Beach and dropped by for lunch with Nasi campur Bali. Melasti beach is a secret beach, hidden between rocks and winding road. It is still a new beach and not so many people goes there.

Nasi campur Bali

While, another beach close by – Pandawa beach, is full crowd of people. Some were swimming, canoeing, walking by the white sand beach. I swim at the sea to release all problems I had in mind.

For the dinner, our family had it in Jimbaran, which is famous for its seafood, grilled fish, and magnificent night view of Jimbaran Beach with Bali airport in a distance.

Finally, after a longgg tough work at campus etc, I successfully arranged a short breakaway within last minute. I usually arrange for a trip like one year or months before.

This year, my family goes to BALI, a paradise island of Indonesia. We did not put much itinerary since we thought that we would spend times enjoying nature, beaches and sceneries.

The plane ticket is quite cheap for close to holiday peak season. This time, we plan for 7 days roaming around in Bali.

DAY 01 – Kuta beachwalk and Kuta Beach.

Kuta beachwalk is nice shopping centre, combining park and mall in the design concept. One can relax at indoor, outdoor, or even semioutdoor area seeing greeneries and flowers. It is located right in front of Kuta Beach, so visitors can also watch Kuta Beach from higher level.

After visiting the Beachwalk of course we are tempted to visit Kuta Beach directly. The best time to visit is 3pm onwards where the sun is not too hot. Kuta Beach is famous for surfers, for it has big waves and long shorelines. Also, we wanted to watch the sun set here, but the weather did not support. There were clouds hiding the sun, but still it was lovely to walk on the beach 🙂

Thank God for giving us another opportunity to explore the wonder of nature ~ God’s creation.

Finally, almost end of the year and I got a chance again to visit Germany. The procedure was quite fast, from visa application, paper sending, and yes this time I got about 11 days visa, though I only used 9 days in Germany.

This time I applied from Honorer Consul of Deutschland in Surabaya. Thus I didn’t have to go to Jakarta. The process was quite easy, but some documents have to be provided. Those are: invitation letter, health insurance, flight booking, assignment letter, salary info. My visa application process was smooth since I am a DAAD alumna and I have been to Deutschland for the past 3 years.

The seminar was in Koeln, a beautiful city famous for its cathedral and also Bonn. It is a seminar for planning specially regarding disaster mitigation and resilience. The schedule was tough though, from Monday to Friday, at 09 am in the morning, till 18.00 in the afternoon continued by dinner in the evening. So there was no time for roaming around until Thursday and Friday where they finished earlier and did not arrange dinner for the participants.

The Koeln Kathedral

The seminar was held by TH Koeln and UN University Bonn with 19 participants from Indonesia, The Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Uganda and keynote experts from Germany, Srilanka and Indonesia. I met new friends and was nice to meet them all though only for one week. Still, we have our assignment – a collaboration paper of participants, hence I will keep in touch with some of them.